LREC 2012 Workshop: 1st CfP Language Resource Merging

[ELRA ELDA Information]

[Apologies for multiple postings]

**1st Call for Papers**
LREC 2012 Workshop on: Language Resource Merging

22 May 2012 -- Afternoon Session

*CONTEXT*
The availability of adequate language resources has been a well-known 
bottleneck for most
high-level language technology applications, e.g. Machine Translation, 
parsing, and
Information Extraction, for at least 15 years , and the impact of the 
bottleneck is becoming all
the more apparent with the availability of higher computational power 
and massive storage,
since modern language technologies are capable of using far more 
resources than the
community produces. The present landscape is characterized by the 
existence of numerous
scattered resources, many of which have differing levels of coverage, 
types of information and
granularity. Taken singularly, existing resources do not have sufficient 
coverage, quality or
richness for robust large-scale applications, and yet they contain 
valuable information
(Monachini et al. 2004 and 2006; Soria et al. 2006; Molinero, Sagot and 
Nicolas 2009;
Necsulescu et al. 2011). Differing technology or application 
requirements, ignorance of the
existence of certain resources, and difficulties in accessing and using 
them, has led to the
proliferation of multiple, unconnected resources that, if merged, could 
constitute a much
richer repository of information augmenting either coverage or 
granularity, or both, and
consequently multiplying the number of potential language technology 
applications. Merging,
combining and/or compiling larger resources from existing ones thus 
appears to be a
promising direction to take.
The re-use and merging of existing resources is not altogether unknown. 
For example,
WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) has been successfully reused in a variety of 
applications. But this is
the exception rather than the rule; in fact, merging, and enhancing 
existing resources is
uncommon, probably because it is by no means a trivial task given the 
profound differences in
formats, formalisms, metadata, and linguistic assumptions.
The language resource landscape is on the brink of a large change, 
however. With the
proliferation of accessible metadata catalogues, and resource 
repositories (such as the new
META-SHARE (http://www.meta-net.eu/meta-share) infrastructure), a 
potentially large
number of existing resources will be more easily located, accessed and 
downloaded. Also, with
the advent of distributed platforms for the automatic production of 
language resources, such
as PANACEA (http://www.panacea-lr.eu/), new language resources and 
linguistic information
capable of being integrated into those resources will be produced more 
easily and at a lower
cost. Thus, it is likely that researchers and application developers 
will seek out resources
already available before developing new, costly ones, and will require 
methods for
merging/combining various resources and adapting them to their specific 
needs.
Up to the present day, most resource merging has been done manually, 
with only a small
number of attempts reported in the literature towards (semi-)automatic 
merging of resources
(Crouch & King 2005; Pustejovsky et al. 2005; Molinero, Sagot and 
Nicolas 2009; Necsulescu et
al. 2011). In order to take a further step towards the scenario depicted 
above, in which
resource merging and enhancing is a reliable and accessible first step 
for researchers and
application developers, experience and best practices must be shared and 
discussed, as this
will help the whole community avoid any waste of time and resources.
*
AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP*
This half-day workshop is meant to be part of a series of meetings 
constituting an ongoing
forum for sharing and evaluating the results of different methods and 
systems for the
automatic production of language resources (the first one was the LREC 
2010 Workshop on
Methods for the Automatic Production of Language Resources and their 
Evaluation Methods).
The main focus of this workshop is on (semi-)automatic means of merging 
language resources,
such as lexicons, corpora and grammars. Merging makes it possible to 
re-use, adapt, and
enhance existing resources, alongside new, automatically created ones, 
with the goal of
reducing the manual intervention required in language resource 
production, and thus
ultimately production costs.

*WORKSHOP TOPICS*
The topics of the workshop are related to best practices, methods, 
techniques and
experimental results regarding the merging of various types of language 
resources, such as
lexicons and corpora, especially in support of language technology 
applications. In particular,
new methods for automatic merging with a view towards reducing human 
intervention will be
most welcome.
Topics for submission include, but are not limited to:
- Experiments on (semi-)automatic merging of automatically produced 
resources
- Experiments on the merging of two or more existing resources 
containing the same or
different levels of linguistic information
- Studies or experiments on merging resources at different levels of 
granularity (corpora,
lexicons, grammars)
- Studies or experiments on unifying, mapping or converting encoding formats
- Comparison between different resources and mapping algorithms to 
provide desired
merging
- Use of linguistic information from different sources in high-level 
language applications
- Use of new, merged language resources in language technology applications

*SUBMISSIONS*
Interested participants must submit a preliminary paper of about 4-6 
pages including
references (between 2000-2500 words). For the submission please use the 
online form on
START LREC Conference Manager at: 
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/MergingLR2012/
When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to 
provide essential
information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, 
standards, evaluation
kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or 
are a new result of your
research.
For further information on this new initiative, please refer to 
http://www.lrecconf.
org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012
Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop Program Committee.

*IMPORTANT DATES*
· Deadline for paper submission: 15 February 2012
· Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2012
· Submission of camera-ready version of papers: 31 March 2012
· Workshop date: 22 May 2012 -- Afternoon Session

*ORGANIZING COMMITTEE*
Núria Bel, UPF, Barcelona, Spain
Maria Gavrilidou, ILSP-"Athena", Athens, Greece,
Monica Monachini, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Valeria Quochi, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge, UK
Contacts
lrec12_workshop_merging at ilc.cnr.it

*PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:*
Victoria Arranz, ELDA, Paris, France
Paul Buitelaaar, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Olivier Hamon, ELDA, Paris, France
Ales( Horák, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, Mass. USA
Bernardo Magnini, FBK, Trento, Italy
Paola Monachesi, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Jan Odijk, , Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Muntsa Padró, IULA, Barcellona, Spain
Karel Pala, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Thierry Poibeau University of Cambridge, UK and CNRS, Paris, France
Benoît Sagot, INRIA, Paris, France
Kiril Simov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
Claudia Soria, CNR-ILC, Pisa, Italy
Maurizio Tesconi, CNR-IIT, Pisa
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